Mission Mission

This band No Age played at that sweet Grass Widow show the other night, and they were pretty amazing too. Drum-playing frontman Dean here charmed the crowd all night with a lot of cute banter. Before one song he exclaimed, “I love playing this song!” How cute!

At one point, he mentioned that the night before they’d opened for the Foo Fighters at Wembley Stadium in London. (Wow, right? From Wembley to the Rickshaw Stop in the space of 24 hours?) He said the crowd there sort of looked at them blankly the whole time, “like we were the weirdest band in the world.” The crowd at the Rickshaw Stop booed and hissed and shouted that this was lame, but Dean offered a word of caution, and a life lesson to an all-ages roomful of impressionable punk rock youth and snooty punk rock elders. “No, no, it’s not lame, it’s just how it is,” he said, “They just don’t know. They don’t know what you know.”

I thought that was nice. People need to be more accepting of different tastes. I’m tired of people getting all bent out of shape when I say I like Lady Gaga. But it’s great that he imparts that wisdom while also acknowledging that punks do in fact know a little something extra about the world, because we do, and that’s important.

A choice quote from some Mission Local coverage of a recent fatal shooting in the Mission:

“There’s a lot of gang banging, a lot of prostitution,” said one law enforcement official who asked not to be identified. “I’m not surprised that violence has popped up there. And then you have the hipsters coming around to the nightspots. There’s a lot of people looking for drugs, so that all works well together. It makes for a thriving community.”

Read on.

[via The Tens]

[Photo by The Secret Alley]

What a shot! (The first one. The second one is kind of a yawner.)

This is why you should be hanging out at Thieves Tavern during the day.

Angela was playing Hangman with a 3rd grader the other day. Kids say the darnedest things, in games of Hangman, when talk of pizza is involved. I love pizza. [link]

I guess that sold-out Wavves show on Saturday was a tad bit sloppy. David Downs reports:

By the closing track, Cooper was so frustrated with his own playing he knocked over his cymbals early. He finished without them, at which point he chucked his sticks into the crowd, and stormed off. Williams yanked off his guitar, hurled it through the drum kit, stalked off and punched Cooper in the back. None of this looked rehearsed.

Whoa! I’m sorry I missed out. I thought that backing band had decided to go straight and act more professional after working with Jay Reatard for so long. Read on for more Wavves antics, and some Best Coast problems too.

[Fast forward to 1:40 or so in the above video for an explanation of why there's 1:40 of Marilyn Manson's "Beautiful People." And for another two minutes after that you can watch a black screen as Wavves plays in total darkness while begging for the stage lights to come on.]

Look how gorgeous we are now!

We’d like to thank David Cole and Tag Savage of Sleepover for the design, our own Vic Wong for his kickass development chops, and Alex and Rudy of MonkeyBrains for their hospitality.

Enjoy the show!

Elephant 6, the collective made up of Neutral Milk Hotel, Of Montreal, Apples in Stereo and many other indie rock favorites, have been working on this feature film Major Organ and the Adding Machine for a while, and on Sunday, they’re screening it at the Roxie. AND playing some songs. Their show at the Independent the night before is sold out, so if you don’t have tickets to that, you might want to hurry up and buy tickets to this.

OR, you could try to win tickets by entering our contest. Leave a comment below relating a personal anecdote about any Elephant 6 project or any instance of a group of musicians making a foray into the realm of cinema, and we’ll pick two winners based on merit. Each winner will get a pair of passes. Contest ends at 8pm on Thursday.

You know how you’ve been meaning to go to Dollar Day at Golden Gate Fields for like a hundred years and you’ve still never been? You should go finally, seriously. I did recently, and it was a lovely day.

The photo ops are plentiful:

The ponies are majestic:

(more…)

Is it just me or is this guy waaay more menacing than he should be?

[Photo by The Minutes]

Lookin’ good!

[Photo by We Built This City]